Circuits of shock and bunk : the politics of the Dutch blogosphere

Theorists of blog practices such as Jodi Dean argue that the enunciative regimes of the blogosphere work toward the decline of symbolic efficiency and they often do not, as (counter)public-sphere approaches have it, involve political will, identity and community. However, in order not to universalize the logics of networked communication and their effects, I argue that shock, slur and parody, however nonsensical and trite, should be understood in terms of complex and contradictory relations to institutions, antagonisms and distributions of power extending beyond the blogosphere. By comparing and contrasting three Dutch-speaking blogs each of which mobilizes enunciative regimes to different effects, this article explores the ways in which the blogosphere’s enunciative regimes alternate between ‘making sense’ and generating symbolic inefficiency; between performances of coherent will/identity and subversions of social stratifications and recognized positions of authority. It further maps the political possibilities within this contextually articulated ‘network culture’ in relation to struggles over representativeness, citizenship and belonging.